Building A Gaming PC - Parts Advice Needed
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Page 27

@Dirtbox Because at the time it was considered to be the best bang for buck card at that resolution. It's still a great card, but as I mentioned earlier, the lack of VRAM is really holding it back, especially if I want to use any form of AA.

I went from a GTX570 to a 770 and I would say the upgrade was worth it. At the time I picked a 4GB model, everyone said it was a total waste but I have found more recent games using the extra ram. Wolfenstien for example uses 2.8GB at 1440p.

As the 4GB models are really over priced at the moment you might not want to do that, but if you find a good deal go for it. But either way a 770 Is a great card. The AMD 290 is a good shout also and side steps the ram question.

Not necessary for 1080p, the 570 will be fine unless you're set on whacking every setting to maximum. I've got a 560Ti that I've been using on a 2560x1080 display and it's managing well. The 570 seems to be slightly faster than the 560Ti in most respects.

If you can afford it I'd go for a gtx 780. It's a big step up from the 770 on all the benchmarks but it costs a lot more. But I bought one for now and the future. I don't want to upgrade my gfx card for at least another 3 years or more.

It depends on what you want it for. I've got a 120hz monitor so wanted a card that could give me a solid 120fps in 1080p in Battlefield. And the 780 absolutely delivers that. The 770 is still a great card though.

That's the one I ordered. If Scan doesn't have free shipping it's cheaper on Aria.co.uk.

Although, I may just cancel it now. Just tried out the 560Ti on 1440p and it's fine. Get between 40-70FPS on BF4, 40+ on Arma 3. That's okay for now, I'm not fussed about spending another £350 for a detail increase I won't notice.

If scan doesn't have free shipping, go to their ebay shop. You can use click and collect free of charge. I picked some recent upgrades up from a nearby Argos having bought them through Scan. I'm loving my new 6gb GTX 780. it's overkill, but should see me through the current increases in vram requirements. It's a clear improvement over my 570

You can get by now at lower res and detail with 1GB, 2GB is comfortable and 3GB has loads of overhead. By the time you come across titles that are actually making use of that 6GB the card might not be up to the job.

Here's some dude off TomsHardware giving a bit more detail about VRAM with regards a 4GB 770 and 3GB 780 (disclaimer: might be bollocks):

If the system memory ran at a sixth, or better, of the speed of the video cards memory then I would call close enough to a draw, but the superior GPU will make a vastly huge difference.

Just because it loads 3.5GB of data to the video card does not mean that every frame rendered needs all of that data (if it did the game would get around 62.6fps assuming that there was no other bottleneck or 'delay' in the rendering pipeline, which we can safely say is false anyway).

Since one sixth of 153.6 GB/sec = 25.6GB/sec (in video card speak they only divide by 1000, not 1024), and those video cards have GDDR5-VRAM in that ballpark (actually higher, but not substantially) I'd say the GTX770 would perform better but only if every frame rendered required the use of all of that 3.5GB of data which is highly unlikely, but not impossible!.

- If the system memory was Dual-Channel at 2333 MHz (which may not be available) then it wouldn't matter.

- If every frame only uses a fraction of that 3.5GB then it also wouldn't matter.

If the GTX770 with 4GB VRAM can sustain 64.11 fps with 3.5GB of texture (and other data) loaded to it then it would actually be faster than a GTX780 with 4GB VRAM depending on the rest of the system specs.

It comes down to the individual frame complexity and what is in the scene being rendered.

If it's mostly shader or other GPU intensive stuff then the GTX780 would easily win out.

If it's mostly data being pulled from Video RAM then the GTX770 with 4GB of VRAM would pull ahead.

I built a PC for a friend a few months ago and recently he tells me that all his games (as well as his browser) are crashing after around 10/15 mins and have been since I built it.

I'll try to detail the problem a little more; when he plays a game online (for example Chiv or Company of Heroes) after roughly ten minutes the game will completely freeze (for around a minute or so) and eventually kick him back to the main menu with an error (usually 'You have lost connection to the host' or 'Your connection has timed out'). When he plays a single player game (such as Max Payne 3) the game will freeze as above but instead of being kicked it'll simply pick up from where it froze. When using his browser it will act the same way (with the same conclusions). The spec is as follows;

I've tried everything I can think of for his PC - tried it on a different internet connection, updated the graphics drivers, updated the BIOS to the latest stable version, ran in safe mode, formatted everything and reinstalled, checked all physical connections inside, made sure cables aren't touching the MB/CPU/GPU and gave it a good clean - no joy at all.